Zooming in on the Nature of Highland Park

Rebecca Grill

        If you want to appreciate nature, view it as you would Google Earth. Zoom in. Zoom out.

        As adults, we drive, we talk, we strive, and perhaps we never wonder about the pale, pink flowers that garnish our lawns in May (Spring Beauties) or the life span of the white oaks that shelter our homes (100 to 150 years) or the presence of folklorish creatures (fox, crow and coyote) in our backyards. The times that nature shouts are times we dread: the snowstorm, the drought, the rain on game day. Mostly, we pass her quiet beauty without notice.

        Visual artists have long understood that if you can get people to respect the delicate, yet practical details of nature, they may become hooked. This fascination is what put Georgia O’Keefe’s flowers on note cards everywhere. It may be why you are enjoying the illustrations and photographs in this publication. What is incredibly hard is to get people to look closely enough, long enough and with enough feeling. Maybe that accounts for the “in your face” quality of O’Keefe’s work.

        “Hey, pay attention,” she demands.

        Children are good at zooming in. They are natural scientists. Why is the leaf fuzzy? Why are there always five seeds in an apple? Why? Why? Why? Ask the parents of a third grader, if they can stand one more question.

        Nature is clever about details. Most of them mean something or tell us something. The leaf is fuzzy because tiny hairs on its surface trap water and keep the plant from drying out. The five seeds of an apple reveal its relation to the rose, where five petals, five leaves and five seeds are shared family traits. In 1959, Mies van der Rohe famously argued that “G-d is in the details.” Maybe that is what we gain if we look into the seeming simplicity of nature: if not evidence of a higher being, maybe a connection to something bigger — or infinitely smaller — than ourselves.

        It’s a lesson that can be learned at Rosewood Beach. According to the Lake Michigan Rock Picker’s Guide, by Bruce Mueller and Kevin Gauthier (The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2006), the Great Lakes are great in part because they have more color and variety of stones than anywhere on the planet. Notice though, among the brightly hued jewels at water’s edge are many more plain black rocks — seemingly ordinary, assuredly smooth and solid. But on closer inspection, the dark stones sparkle with tiny salt-like crystals. This is basalt, and rock hounds estimate it is about(!) one billion years old. Once a piece of hardened volcanic lava that burst forth and rapidly cooled as the earth’s crust was formed, the tiny crystals are the result of minerals present in the flow. The pebble you hold was likely part of a boulder that scraped its way along from Canada during the last local glacial action 10,000 years ago. And there it is — that link to the big picture. Zoom in. Zoom out.

        Nature’s details also reveal relationships. In our forests, tiny fungi perform routine maintenance that breaks down leaf litter and returns nutrients to the soil (zoom in); a great oak tree depends on those nutrients to prepare fat acorns for hungry jays when winter sets in (zoom out). Relationships symbiotic, parasitic and sublime are evidenced by the details of who (or what) lives together, eats one another; thrives and dies together. So what of our relationship with nature? A white oak in a remote location might be expected to live 400 years or more. In our backyards, simply because we are here — with our lawns, our buildings, our cars — we have changed the details of their existence and foreshortened their life span. But if we pay attention to the little things — allow leaves to fall and decay, keep mowers away from fragile bark and resist the urge to gorge the greenery with nitrogen and phosphorous — we might become a positive force in keeping the balance.

        While we can worry about the shrinking ice cap (zoom out: imagine a world with no polar bears), it could be argued that our health and happiness depends most on our neighborhood ecosystem. It is certainly the place we can do the most about. How would our days begin without the softness of clean morning dew? (What do we send down our drains and on to the “dump”?) How bearable would our afternoons be without the cool shade of trees? (How do we preserve them?) What would twilight be without a diversity of bird song to soothe us into the night? After all, Highland Park is the place where our children contemplate pale, pink flowers in the springtime lawn. Zoom in.